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Are Girl-Focused Engineering Toys Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes?
theodp writes: VentureBeat's Ruth Read casts a skeptical eye at the current rage of toy segregation meant to inspire tomorrow's leaders in STEM: "Toys geared at girls serve to get them interested in coding and building when they're young, hopefully inspiring their educational interests down the road. But these gendered toys may be hurting women by perpetuating a divide between men and women." Read concludes, "Ultimately, girls (who will become women) are going to have to learn and work in a world where genders are not segregated; as will men. That means they need to learn how to interact with one another as much as they need to be introduced to the same educational opportunities. If STEM education is as much for girls as it is for boys, perhaps we should be equally concerned with getting boys and girls to play together with the same toys and tools, as we are with creating learning opportunities for girls."
Both genders should have the same opportunities. They don't necessarily have the same interests.
Remember when this site wasn't constantly about SJW topics and jobs? When it didn't try to make you feel bad for being a nerd?
Screw you Dice.
Is Slashdot rhetorically asking about an issue that people has been pointing out for years about this matter? For the love of Pete: YES – toys "geared at girls" is stereotyping at its finest! Loads of toys (not even mentioning professional tools) is not focused on gender whatsoever. Stop painting them in pink, both symbolically and literally speaking! It helps no one, especially not girls in the end.
There are 2 types of people in the world - those who understand decimal and those who don't.
:P thanks for that clarification i just couldn't make the connection before.
So why bother trying? You don't make engineering toys for girls, they complain about them not existing; you make them for girls, they complain about them being stereotypical.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
This assumes that most of these girl specific initiatives intend to actually help girls. They aren't, and instead serve as flashpoints to draw money to charlatans, much like any of the "think of the children" campaigns from the last few decades.
I swear the similarities between modern feminism and the Satanism scare of the 80s are becoming increasingly uncomfortable.
And the conclusion is correct- most of the women coders I know were, in part, goaded into familiarity by playing with their brothers.
Why make science and engineering toys girly? Because of the parents who wouldn't buy a non-gendered toy. Girls enjoy fishing newts out of a pond, making towers and knocking them down. etc. as much as boys, but many parents discourage this. Enjoying these things at 3 to 4 years is a good foundation for enjoying construction and understanding stability, or examining echo systems when they are older.
You could equally ask why men aren't flocking to careers in nursing, early childhood care, or beauty therapy. I suspect it has less to do with discrimination, and more to do with men just don't give a shit about those careers. Be it money, status, working conditions, whatever. Men don't want it. Same probably goes for women in technology, construction, and trades. I don't even care if there is a gender imbalance in nursing, early childhood care, or beauty therapy. I don't know any women who care either. But if I did care, I might find that balancing the male side of the equation in female dominated careers already half solves the female side if things in male dominated careers. Men are welcome to join female dominated careers, if they want. Women are welcome to join male dominated careers, if they want. If people don't want, then they don't want.
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
Except that there may well be a large influence in the culture handed over by upbringing. That is, we think both genders get the same opportunities only they don't, not really. This was much stronger previously but may still be there more than we think.
Then again, I'm not sure that clumsily done toys to get women into engineering isn't overcompensating the whole thing, and maybe the effect they're trying to counteract and compensate for isn't as strong as the proponents of these toys may have assumed.
To wit, you still see people derping about the "gender gap" in pay, which upon closer examination turns out to be all but nonexistent. There is a maternity gap in pay, but that, while related, isn't quite the same thing. Women appear to be getting paid the same for the same amount of work, but many prefer to work less, moreso if with children. Should employers pay more for the same amount of work done just because the employee is with child? If so, why?
Back to this here thing: I don't know what the problem really is and so I don't know if these toys are going to help or hinder. Of course you can just throw your solution into the market and see how it does. But then the answer is "time will tell".
"Research" means nothing to the folks, who confuse the Universe that is with the Universe that should be. And, unlike the former, the latter is malleable and subject to change without notice.
Remember the denunciations — both passionately angry and "scientific" — of people, who suggested, "homosexuality is a choice", for example? We were repeatedly told both in print and in schools, that "gays are born that way" and thus it is both stupid and cruel to blame them for their lifestyle.
And maybe it is — I do not know. But the The Current Truth is changing. And, unlike Ben Carson, nobody yells at Miley Cirus for "adopting a more fluid label to her sexuality". Sexuality, you see, is a "social construct" now (and since 2004!) — and whatever a human actually feels is simply a reflection of "stereotyping" to be broken, and "peer pressure" to be resisted. With pride.
Whichever is true, both can not be true at the same time, but the conflict of these two ideas does not bother their proponents whatsoever, such logical rational beings they are. "Research" my tail...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Well, here's my anecdote with a sample size of n=2. I have a son and a daughter.
When I bought my very first LEGO set for them, it was a generic box of plain shapes. Something like this.
My son played with them. My daughter didn't. So I bought this and mixed the pieces in. The "draw" of the cutesy pieces drew my daughter in. Now she plays with all the pieces.
So...yeah. I guess what I'm saying is, I don't think they just "color it pink". Probably a bunch of focus testing and playtesting occurs so they know what draws girls to the toys.
Now, a related question...why did pink and cats draw her in? Is it innate? Or is it something she was taught by society? To that question, I have no answer.
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
I finally realized what all this pressure for female coders is about! The powers that be want to be able to eliminate all their male competition: (e.g. like schools of fish or Dr. Strangelove [imdb.com]). Since the technocracy is rising, they can soon rely on robots for all the heavy lifting -- their only problem remaining is the maintaince and programming of the robots and systems they don't want to be bothered with -- so they still need some annoying technical people around. At the moment they're mostly male. :( Not good if you're trying to be the last man on earth!
Conclusion: if the goal is for the males that are now in power (or their great-grandsons who will be in power) to be the only males on the face of the planet: then for everything to keep going they must somehow inculcate females to code and eliminate the need for all (other) males entirely.